Judge Jansen’s Indy pilgrimage began with 1949 trip in Packard

When the two ladies and 31 gentlemen start their engines for the 99th running of the Indianapolis 500 today, there will be plenty of Las Vegas storylines to follow, as there usually are, at the venerable Brickyard.

In the middle of the starting grid on Row 7 there’s Alex Tagliani. The 2011 fastest Indy qualifier and his fashion model wife, Bronte — and now baby daughter Eva-Rose — make their home in Las Vegas. This year Tags is driving for A.J. Foyt, in a car bearing Dan Gurney’s number and paint scheme.

The year Tags qualified on the pole he drove for Sam Schmidt, a longtime resident of Lake Las Vegas. Schmidt once drove in the 500, too. Now he owns a racing team and has three cars in the big race.

Jimmy Vasser, who lives on the golf course at Canyon Gate, has 10 IndyCar driving victories and won the series championship in 1996. He is co-owner of a team that also put three cars in today’s race. It was just two years ago that popular veteran Tony Kanaan notched a surprise win in the 500 while driving for Vasser and his partner, Kevin Kalkhoven.

Down on the pit lane, Green Valley High’s Jamie Little will be following around NASCAR star Jeff Gordon, the Indy 500 pace car driver, as part of her duties for Fox. Little and her husband, Cody Selman, own a couple of local Jimmy John’s sandwich shops. Cody’s a fixture at the speedway, too — he will be changing tires on Townsend Bell’s No. 24 today.

All of these racing people have been going to Indy for years. But they haven’t been going as long as Judge Bill Jansen, who was justice of the peace in Las Vegas for 26 years, presiding over the weddings of auto racing luminaries such as Carroll Shelby and Ray Evernham, Jeff Gordon’s former NASCAR crew chief.

Jansen traveled to his first Indianapolis 500 in a Packard Clipper, if that tells you anything.

The year was 1949.

A guy named Bill Holland won the 500 that year. The track still was made of bricks. After the race, they’d let you go down on the track; Bill Jansen remembers the bricks were covered with so much oil, you could skate across them as if on ice.

As for the Packard, it belonged to Jansen’s Uncle Herb. It had a big hood ornament on front.

The Jansen men — the judge was 13 then — loaded up the Packard and drove the 211 miles from Pekin, Ill., to Indianapolis, and Bill Jansen was hooked. Hooked on the speed, and all those people, and the pageantry, and the sounds of the engines on race day at Indianapolis. Especially the sound of the Novi engine. You could hear Duke Nalon and the thunderous roar of the Novi from the living room couch in Decatur, he said.

This will be the 30th consecutive year that Bill, now 79, and Nora Jansen and assorted other Jansens will be watching the 500 from the second row of the penthouse boxes in Turn 1. You either have to know somebody or work your way up the ticket ladder to get seats like those.

Judge Bill Jansen, a live witness to around 50 Indy 500s altogether, knows ol’ A.J. himself a little bit, well enough that when he drops by the Foyt garage, Super Tex always comes out to say hello. But he mostly worked his way up for those seats, like the year Scott Goodyear worked his way up from 33rd and dead last, only to finish second to Al Unser Jr. in the closest Indy finish ever — Junior won by 0.043 seconds.

That was the cold race, Judge Bill said. Forty-eight degrees with a windchill of 28. The hot race was in 1953. Bill Vukovich won that one; 11 drivers required relief drivers. One driver, Carl Scarborough, died in the infield hospital of heat prostration.

Bill Jansen said he’ll never forget how hot and humid it was, and how Vuky won, driving the entire 500 miles by his lonesome. Bill Vukovich was a hardened man, like ol’ A.J. himself. But Indy can be a brutal, unforgiving place, regardless of how tough and hard you are.

Two years later, while racing toward an unprecedented third consecutive Indy win, Bill Vukovich was killed in a backstretch pileup. The judge says he’ll never forget the 1955 Indy 500, because Vuky and Tony Bettenhausen were his favorite drivers. Bettenhausen also was killed at Indy, during practice in 1961.

He would see Vuky’s son, also named Bill, drive at Indy. He would see Bill Vukovich Jr.’s son, Billy III, drive at Indy. He would see multiple generations of Unsers speed down those hallowed straightaways, and the great Jim Clark, who like the judge’s wife was from Great Britain, and multiple generations of Andrettis, and several Bettenhausens. And Dario (Franchitti) and Helio (Castroneves) and all of today’s leadfoots.

He saw Danica Patrick battle for the win during her rookie race at Indy in 2005 before finishing fourth.

A young woman, almost winning the 500, as a rookie?

Judge Bill Jansen never would have imagined that in 1949, when he and his brother and their old man piled into Uncle Herb’s Packard Clipper, the one with the big hood ornament on front, and drove off toward Indiana, toward the sound of the engines.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.